Rodger Lea – bio

Currently CEO of Internet of Things startup, Sense Tecnic, Dr. Lea has over 25 years experience spanning academic, large corporations and startups. For the last 10 years, he has started or helped start 4 new companies while managing an active research program (University of British Columbia, Canada and Lancaster University, UK) into distributed and ubiquitous computing.

Prior to his startups, Dr. Lea spent over 15 years in industrial research, most recently as Vice President and Director of Sony’s US distributed system lab, located in Silicon Valley, CA. In this capacity, Dr. Lea aided in developing advanced technologies to support Sony’s broadband media strategy including research and development in areas such as future media presentation formats, media delivery and caching, digital and interactive TV, home networking and peer to peer infrastructure technologies. This research generated over 100 international patents and delivered technology into a number of major products ranging from Sony’s interactive set-top boxes, to the Sony PDAs and High Definition TV systems.

Before this, Dr Lea was part of Sony’s Tokyo based Computer Science Laboratory where he led developments in the area of adaptive operating systems, and networked virtual reality systems.

Before joining Sony, Dr. Lea spent time with Hewlett Packard’s research labs where he led the definition and implementation of a distributed fault tolerant infrastructure for telecom systems. This work grew out of his previous role heading up the European research and development programs for Chorus Systems, a French start up company which spun out of the French national research labs.

Dr. Lea holds a Ph.D in computer science from Lancaster University in the UK and has numerous publications in the area of distributed systems, operating systems and home networking. He is the holder of several US patents and has published books on the Internet of Things (IoT) web graphics (WebGL), home networking and 3D graphics for virtual reality systems. He currently splits his time between BC, Silicon Valley and Europe.